If you remember having kissed your better half listening to a Count Basic record at 78 RPM (That is Revolutions or spins Per Minute for the newbies), fearing that your in-laws will catch you, it is very likely that you might have difficulties reading this article without magnifying glasses. However, is the first time you listened to music was on MP3 format, you probably can't read this article yet.

People's age can be estimated by the way the music was recorded and played when they were born. Would you be happy if somebody calls you older than a vitrola?

The evolution of recorded sound spans a long time. In 1500 BC the Greeks created the colossal "vocal" statue of Memmon. In the middle Ages, music was reproduced by cylinders with attached pins that would strike certain keys or bells when rotated.

A few centuries later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the flood of new inventions from the Industrial Revolution, brought long punched-card strips, derived from the textile industry, to control the air bellows of an organ “The Jacquard organ” or the keys of a piano. (What a party!!!!!)

After the wheel and the card, electricity emerged as the main method of recording sound. After countless attempts by many inventors, Edison made the first recording of a human voice ("Mary had a little lamb") in 1877 on the first tinfoil cylinder phonograph, and started the modern history of sound recording.

The next step was to jump from the cylinder to the disc, initially, 7-inch hard rubber discs, and later shellac from the Duranoid Co. By 1894, the newly formed U. S. Gramophone Company had sold 1000 gramophones and over 25000 records that played at 78 RPM.

Bitter battles followed among the many inventors and entrepreneurs that tried to dominate this lucrative business and many new devices were thrown into the market. Names like graphophone, Indestructible Phonograph, Telegraphone, Zonophone, Dictaphone, and the better known “Victrola" were competing for customers.

In 1926, Vitaphone Co. introduced the new recording speed of 33 1/3 rpm in synch with the sound of film reels and in 1948 a “War of speeds” among the three recording speeds of 78, 45, 33-1/3 rpm was at a peak.

The next big step was the magnetic recording, patented in Germany, in 1928.
In 1945, Capt. John Mullin captured two Magnetophones in Radio Frankfurt, and brought them home and marketed them. Only in 1963, Philips demonstrated its first compact audio cassette, the popular “CASSETTE” we all know, and still listen to sometimes (OLDIE!!!!!).
In 1966, William Lear (founder of the Learjet aviation company) introduced the 8-track stereo cartridge tape players, developed for U.S cars, and yet another battle began, but the Cassette prevailed.

1982, marked the end of the analogical era of recording music and the beginning of the digital age, when the first digital audio 5-inch CDs were marketed, merging the consumer music industry with the computer revolution, followed in 1987 by the introduction of Digital Audio Tape (DAT) players, a kind of digital cassette that never really took off. Soon, everybody went digital. In 1988, for the first time, CD sales surpassed LP sales, leaving Cds and cassettes as the two dominant consumer formats.

Up to here, and due to the restrictions on the storage capacity, only sounds could be stored. For example, a CD-ROM could store around 700 Mb. of data, that is close to 74 minutes of good music, but something was about to change!!
In 1993, the first versions of the DVD, (Acronym for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disk), were developed and in November 1996, the first DVD players went on sale in Japan.
This advanced type of CD-ROM can hold a maximum of 17 gigabytes of information, and opened the possibility of storing entire movies.

You thought that was it? It just started, at that time Internet was developing and brains were working. Something was needed for people to be able to download music to the computer and share it with friends. But music takes a lot of space in the computer, and a lot of time to download. So, it had to be compressed.

In 1997, in San Diego, Michael Robertson, developed mp3, (short for Motion Picture Experts Group 1, Audio Layer 3), opening a new era for sound recording.
Now the music have no owners. Why buying if you could download it for free? You could have it in your computer and share it by using some of the available programs like Kazaa, etc... As expected, the big recording companies are not happy and are still fighting legal battles against this new revolution.
So, what's next? Several new technologies which are promising more capacity, compression and quality are already competing to be the standards of the future, but that story will have to be written by the mp3 babies of today.
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